Slaves of numbers

Nilesh, our resident bekaar bheja aka idle mind was on a trip to Silicon Valley as a part of his MBA at Johnson. They call it networking :D. I took him to the Santa Clara City Library and he suggested “Against the Gods” as a good reading. I am glad he did that. It is a lucid tale of Risk. I will write about it detail in another post. The following paragraph intrigued me so I am posting it over here.

Our lives teem with numbers, but we sometimes forget that numbers are only tools. They have no soul; they may indeed become fetishes. Many of our most critical decisions are made by computers, contraptions that devour like voracious monsters and insist on being nourished with ever-greater quantities of digits to crunch, digest and spew back.